Imagining the Future
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Film Review: "The Yes Men Fix the World"
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Bicycle Inspirations From Copenhagen to Portland
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Making a Global Climate Wake-up Call on Sept. 21
Climate Action Goes Creative
Published October 31, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Last Saturday's International Day of Climate Action was, as Mike Smith wrote on this blog, "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history." Not only that, but it was fun.
The action was structured around the concept of 350, which is the parts per million of carbon dioxide we can afford to have in our atmosphere.
Enthusiastic participants all over the world made visual depictions of 350 -- using everything from their bodies to sandbags to sailboats to a flotilla of yellow balloons -- and photographed them for the world to see. The curious one that heads this post was generated by lantern walkers in Sydney, Australia.
So what's so important about 350 and how can you get in on the fun?
What Is a Green-Collar Job?
Published September 07, 2009 @ 04:19PM PT
"Green-collar jobs" have become a daily facet of the national conversation on energy policy, as well as economic revival. At the most fundamental, these are jobs that link rapid decarbonization of the nation's energy economy, with reviving the nation's eviscerated manufacturing base.
Here's how Apollo Alliance chair Phil Angelides defined green-collar jobs to Time Magazine last year:
It has to pay decent wages and benefits that can support a family. It has to be part of a real career path, with upward mobility. And it needs to reduce waste and pollution and benefit the environment.
The green jobs vision is creating some refreshing new advocacy partnerships, like the Blue Green Alliance, a joint effort of environmental groups and labor unions.
And it's not a particularly partisan issue -- or at least it wasn't a few years ago. The expansion of the green-collar jobs sector got its first major federal boost in 2007, with the passage of the Green Jobs Act, as Title X of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
Street Art as Solar-powered Biofuel Generator
Published September 02, 2009 @ 03:57PM PT
From vertical farms to solar forests, neutralizing the carbon footprint of urban centers is one of the most popular trends in design.
Los Angeles firm Emergent Architecture has come up with a concept that combines public art with creating biofuel. Called a "photobioreactor," the aquarium-like structure would contain green algae colonies, also known as pond scum, which produce an oil that can be processed into a biodiesel fuel that can replace petroleum-based diesel fuel.
Even better, green algae consumes carbon dioxide, which is the leading driver of human-propelled global warming.
The system would use "tuned LED lights which vary in color and intensity to support algae growth at different stages of development, maximizing output," according to Emergent. (I'm not quite sure what this means, but suspect it has something to do with recent developments in using nano-materials to create LEDs that surpass their conventional cousins in the colors of light they can produce.)
A thin-film solar array strung into the branches of nearby street trees would collect energy during the day; stored in batteries, it would power the bioreactor's systems at night.
The firm has imagined a Los Angeles-based installation of bioreactors into the sides of buildings, as well as a public art piece for a Perth, Australia involving freestanding bioreactors built to evoke the shapes of cellular structures.
Rather than just stand and symbolize something, say the designers, the installation would also be doing something useful: using and creating clean energy. "Now, one could argue that artwork shouldn't actually do work," they acknowledge. But "if this decade in human civilization has presented us with any resonant knowledge about our world, it is that energy is culturally precious, that it is possibly the ultimate medium.
"Energy may indeed be one of the most timely mediums for art."
Image via Emergent Architecture
Via Solar Feeds
Videos to Watch: Home Building for an Unstable Climate
Published August 30, 2009 @ 08:34PM PT
The chances are very good that East Biloxi, Missippi will be hit again by a future hurricane at least as severe as 2005's Hurricane Katrina. Rising ocean temperatures due to global warming are already creating more intense coastal storms, many climatologists say, and that's likely to just get worse in coming decades.
But as I wrote yesterday, the seven families participating in Biloxi Model Home Project didn't want to leave the neighborhood. So architects working with the project created designs that factored in future floods and high winds.
Here are a few videos about the project and some of the designs, which are available for free use and adaptation at the Open Architecture Network:
1. Porchdog
Porchdog is one of the designs created for the East Biloxi rebuilding project.
2. Principal Voices: Design for good
Architecture for Humanity founder Cameron Sinclair (a fellow former Worldchanging blogger) explains his "design for good" philosophy, spotlighting the Biloxi Model Home Program.
3. Caesarstone Video
Describes the destruction left behind in Biloxi by Hurricane Katrina, and visits the site of one of the Biloxi Model Homes to describe how their designs meet the challenge of living as safely as possible in the storm zone, while also keeping the homes affordable.
The Long, Lame Tradition of Reactionary Astroturfing
Published August 18, 2009 @ 06:47AM PT
Political reactionaries and some sectors of the health care industry have allied against health care reform. A collaboration with very similar characteristics will, according to reports, soon be turning out crowds at fake grassroots rallies to stop energy policy reform and action on global warming, as well.
For an entertaining preview of what's coming down the pike for climate and energy, consider this flashback to 1961. In this ad, "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine," the Gipper encourages citizens to write their legislators in opposition to the creation of Medicare:
The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally di vided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. . .
All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.
... [If Medicare is enacted], one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
"During the 1960s, conservatives regularly claimed that Medicare would destroy the doctor-patient relationship, interject government into every-day decisions and undermine personal freedoms," writes Wonkroom. The media and politics accountability blog created this video to demonstrate how Sarah Palin evoked these simply-not-truths from Reagan during the presidential campaign last fall.
Reactionaries are echoing them now, to try and derail health care reform.
When it came to imagining the future, Ronald Reagan and his conservative allies were zero for zero on accuracy. Medicare was enacted. Free market capitalism survived and flourished (and crashed, and flourished, and crashed, and...). World socialism has near-totally disintegrated, while Western democracy has, with some bruising, continued steadily to this very day.
The predictions, as well as the effort to evoke fear in the public, are not new -- and they're not improved with age.
Life on Waterpod: Barge-borne home shows off sustainable living
Published August 15, 2009 @ 10:44AM PT
The Waterpod is a floating home-sculpture-adventure in sustainable living.
“It’s about getting people to talk about how we can sustain ourselves in the future,” said artist Mary Mattingly to The Brooklyn Paper earlier this year. Mattingly worked to realize the project for three years, and is living on Waterpod herself May through October.
The recycled, 240-foot long, 3,000 square foot art barge, which has been docking at various points around New York Harbor this summer, features a geodesic "Buckyball" dome as a living space, a flock of four egg-laying hens (Gilly, Rizzo, Marble and Bonzai), a hydroponic garden, a greywater recycling system and human-powered water pumping, energy generated primarily from four rooftop solar panels (along with a bicycle power generating station and a "picohydro" energy system for brief bursts of extra energy when needed), composting toilets, and a space where the public can come on board for performances.
New York Times reporter Melena Ryzik has lived abord Waterpod intermittently. She reports being "surprised at how easy it was to adapt to the Pod’s eco-conscious systems (reuse everything, don’t mind the ever-present flies, and compost, compost, compost)..."
...and how quickly the rhythms and routines of urban life melted away. Even though the Pod was docked only blocks away, a brief visit to the farmer’s market in Dumbo one Sunday felt like a trip into “town” – and into civilization. Ooh, look! A flushing toilet!
It's an experiment in ecologically sensitive living that evokes memories of "Biosphere 2" (the Earth is Biosphere 1, natch), the troubled 1990s project that sought to prove the viability of closed-system, grow-your-own living.
But the artists living on board Waterpod and managing its systems have learned (consciously or no) from that semi-fiasco. Although they grow greens and veggies on the barge, and of course get eggs from the hens, they're accepting food donations as well. They get fresh water from rainfall and the river. And they're regularly welcoming the public aboard: check the docking schedule to find out where to meet the barge.
I imagine that some will see this as a wholly unrealistic way to live. But none of the systems are radical: stationary bikes are already being used to generate energy, for instance; places like Vermont Law School are saving water and chemicals by using composting toilets; city gardening is making a big comeback for both economic and food safety reasons; and of course solar power generation is a proven technology that's getting better all the time.
Even the thing that seems most unusual about Waterpod -- living on the water -- is actually common all around the world.
Perhaps Waterpod is actually the leading edge on restoring ourselves to a way of life that can really endure: one that values clean water and uses it wisely, relies on local food supplies to a much greater extent, takes advantage of clean energy sources to the fullest, and both depends upon and gives back to the local community.
Look at it this way: If they'd called it "Extreme Houseboating," then everyone would want to do it.
Do-It-Yourself Enviro, Ag, Science "Afrigadget" Makers Gather in Accra
Published August 10, 2009 @ 08:45AM PT
Above: The Zeer pot is an African cooling gadget which, for less than $2US in local materials and without electricity, can extend the storage lifetime of fresh produce by as much as 18 days...Two clay pots are nested with a relatively thin layer of sand between them. The sand is watered twice daily, and the lidded inner pot is cooled by evaporation. More info at the end of this post.
The first-ever Maker Faire Africa, happening this week in Accra, Ghana, will put a heavy emphasis on what activist-entrepreneur Emeka Okafor calls bottom-up indigenous industrialization. It's a challenge to the top-down style of international aid and development programs, which typically focus on bringing "First World" technologies and agriculture methods into poorer nations, whether or not they really suit local conditions. (Worse, these are often technologies and food production methods that contribute to worsening global warming.)
In contrast, bottom-up indigenous industrialization offers solutions that are based on local knowledge, materials, and infrastructure. The emphasis is on smaller-scale, local economic development, rather than projects that generate food and goods for export to Europe and North America.
The event in Accra looks like it will feature more pragmatic inventions and innovations and get them into mass distribution; tech that's locally designed, with the potential to help people pull themselves out of poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation (while steering firmly away from digital information and communication technologies, or ICT):
Maker Faire Africa asks the question, “What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from Mali with those from Ghana and Kenya, and add resources to the mix?”
Maker Faire Africa will engage on-the-ground breakthrough organizations like Ashesi University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to sharpen focus on locally-generated, bottom-up prototypes of technologies that solve immediate challenges to development. Specifically, Maker Faire Africa will take an approach that will achieve three principal aims:
- Brighten the light on local examples of the “fabrication” ethos
- Provide mechanisms to incubate these innovators and their products to a point where they can be taken to market
- Connect refined plans to disseminate innovations with venture finance
The aim is to identify, spur and support local innovation. At the same time, Maker Faire Africa would seek to imbue creative types in science and technology with an appreciation of fabrication and by default manufacturing. The long-term interest here is to cultivate an endogenous manufacturing base that supplies innovative products in response to market needs.
That's not to say everything must be serious. Maker Faire Africa is being programmed on four tracks, according to the event's first press release, which factor in art, craft and Lego blocks along with the bio-energy sources:
- Robotics – Lead by Afrobotics in the ROBOlab, this track host lectures as well as a LEGO robotics workshop and competition.
- Agriculture & Environment – takes a new look at sustainability, green technologies and innovations such as biofuel and architecture.
- Science and Engineering - this track will highlight new innovations from the 3rd annual International Development Design Summit (IDDS) at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) (a joint project with MIT and MacArthur “Genius Grant” award winner Amy Smith, who has focused on fostering indigenous technological development).
- Arts & Crafts – held at an outdoor art center, this track will showcase everything from sculptures to toys to textiles
Maker-type events I've been to in the US typically feature a lot of whimsical gadgetry, some hacked energy conservation-related tools, and a smattering of works with loftier artistic goals. They're fun, sometimes thought-provoking, and often more than a little anti-corporate. The fundamental organizing principle is that you can make something yourself instead of buying it at the store -- reflecting both our high level of prosperity as a nation, and a major challenge of American-style late stage capitalism: transforming ourselves back into citizens who shop as necessary in order to live, instead of consumers who live to shop.
Understandably, Maker Faire Africa's gadgets and gizmos are likely to be more down-to-earth. We've got our problems, and they've got theirs.
I'd love to be in Accra this week to enjoy Maker Faire Africa firsthand. (Hello, assigning editors!) Ah well: If you won't be making it to Ghana, either, I'd recommend keeping an eye on the following blogs and tags for first-hand reports from the scene:
Maker Faire Africa blog
Maker Faire Africa on Twitter
#mfa09 on Twitter
Emeka Okafor, at Timbuktu Chronicles
I'll add more links if and as I encounter them...please add yours to the comments!
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Image: "The Zeer pot is an African cooling gadget which, for less than $2US in local materials and without electricity, can extend the storage lifetime of fresh produce by as much as 18 days. It is of staggeringly simple design: Two clay pots are nested with a relatively thin layer of sand between them. The sand is watered twice daily, and the inner pot, which is lidded, is cooled by evaporation. It's interesting to note that, although the technology to manufacture the zeer pot has existed literally since the dawn of civilization, it is not known to have been produced until recently. Who would have thought there was a profound invention remaining to be discovered using only clay and sand?" Via Make Magazine Blog
